Jihad, the Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects Part II

Nothing could be further from the
truth than to imagine that the dhimmis enjoyed a secure and stable status
permanently and definitively acquired -- that they were forever protected
and lived happily ever after. Contrary to this picture perpetrated by
Islamic apologists, the status of dhimmis was very fragile indeed, and was
constantly under threat. The dhimmis were in constant danger of being made
into slaves. For example, when in 643, Amr conquered Tripoli, he forced
the Jews and Christians to handover their women and children as slaves to
the Arab army, and they were told to deduct this "handover" from
the poll-tax, the dreaded "jizya." Between 652 and 1276, Nubia
was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo.
The treaties concluded under the Umayyads and the Abbasids with the
towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (modern N.W.Africa)
all stipulate an annual tribute of slaves of both sexes. The principal
source of the reservoir of slaves was the constant raids on the villages
in the"dar al harb"; and the more disciplined military
expeditions which mopped up more thoroughly the cities of the unbelievers.
All the captives were deported en masse. In 781, at the sack of Ephesus,
7000 Greeks were deported in captivity. After the capture of Amorium in
838, the Caliph Al Mutasim ordered the captives, as there were so many of
them, to be auctioned in batches of five and ten. At the sack of
Thssalonica in 903, 22000 Christians were divided among the Arab
chieftains or sold into slavery. In 1064; the Seljuk Sultan, Alp Arslan
devastated Georgia and Armenia. Those he did not take as prisoners, he
executed. The literary sources for Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Armenia,
and later Anatolia and Safavid Persia reveal that those families who could
not pay the crushing Jizya or poll tax were obliged to hand over their
children and to"deduct "it from the Jizya. Christians, for at
least 300 years, suffered one other humiliation not often discussed: a
process known as DEVSHIRME. It was introduced by the Ottoman Sultan Orkhan
(1326 - 1359) and consisted of periodically taking a fifth of all
Christian children in the conquered territories .Converted to Islam, these
children aged between 14 and 20 were trained to be janissaries or infantry
men. These periodic abductions eventually became annual. The Christian
children were taken from among the Greek aristocracy, and from the Serbs,
Bulgarians, Armenians and Albanians, and often from among the children of
the priests. At a fixed date, all the fathers were ordered to appear with
their children in the public square. The recruiting agents chose the most
sturdy and handsome children in the presence of a Muslim judge. Any father
who shirked his duty to provide children was severely punished. Needless
to say this, this system was open to all kinds of abuse. The recruiting
agents often took more than the prescribed number of children and sold the
"surplus" children back to their parents. Those unable to buy
back their children had to accept them being sold into slavery. This
institution was abolished in 1656, though a parallel system where young
children between six and ten were taken to be trained in the seraglio of
the sultan continued until the 18th century.
The number of children taken each year seems to have varied - some
scholars place it as high as 12000 a year, others at 8000; there was
probably an average of at least 1000 a year. The devshirme is an obvious
infringement of the rights of the dhimmis, a reminder that their rights
were far from secure, once and for all.

RELIGIOUS MATTERS

(1) Places of Worship

In the late 19th century, Ash
Sharani summed up the views of the four main sunni schools on the question
of the building of new churches and synagogues: "All schools agree
that it is not allowed to build new churches or synagogues in towns or
cities of Islam. They differ whether this is permitted in the
neighbourhood of towns. Malik, Shafe'i, and Ahmad do not permit it; Abu
Hanifa says that if the place is a mile or less from a town, it is not
permitted; if the distance is greater, it is.
Another question is, whether it is allowed to restore ruinous or
rebuild ruined churches or synagogues in Islamic countries. Abu Hanifa,
Malik,and Shafe'i permit it. Abu Hanifa adds the condition that the church
is in a place that surrendered peaceably; if it was conquered by force, it
is not allowed. Ahmad...says that the restoration of the ruinous and the
rebuilding of the ruined is never permitted."

The fate of churches and
synagogues, as of Christians and Jews, varied from country to country,
ruler to ruler. Some Muslim rulers were very tolerant, others extremely
intolerant. In 722 A.D., for example Usama b. Zaid, the surveyor of taxes
in Egypt, attacked convents and destroyed churches.
But the caliph Hisham told him to leave the Christians in peace.
Some caliphs not only respected the rights of non-Muslims, but very
generously paid for the repairs of any churches destroyed by mob violence.
Tritton also gives the example of Spain: "During the conquest of
Spain the Muslims were much less tolerant.
On one of his expeditions Musa destroyed every church and broke
every bell. When Marida surrendered the Muslims took the property of those
killed in the ambush, of those who fled to Galicia, of the churches, and
the church jewels." Similarly, the caliph Marwan (ruled 744-750)
looted and destroyed many monasteries in Egypt while fleeing the Abbasid
army. He destroyed all the
churches in Tana except one, and he asked three thousand dinars as the
price for sparing that. In
853 A.D. the caliph Mutawakkil ordered all new churches to be destroyed.
As Tritton says, from an early date churches were liable to be
razed to the ground for some caprice of the ruler. Often the
Muslim mob took matters into its own hands. Tritton gives the
following examples of riots in which religious buildings were destroyed.
In 884 the convent of Kalilshu in Baghdad was destroyed, the gold
and silver vessels stolen, and all wood in the building sold. In 924 the
church and convent of Mary, in Damascus were burnt and plundered, and
other churches wrecked. Further
destruction occurred in Ramleh, Ascalon, Tinnis, and in Egypt during the
invasion by Asad ud Din Shirkuh. "Al Hakim biamr illah gave orders
that the churches in his dominions should be destroyed. Their contents
were seized and the vessels of gold and silver sold in the markets... The
church lands were confiscated and every one who asked for some got it. A
Muslim historian reports that over thirty thousand churches which had been
built by the Greeks were destroyed in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. Bar
Hebraeus is more modest, he only says thousands." The riot of 1321 in
Cairo in which several churches were destroyed, in turn led to the
destruction of churches throughout Egypt -- in all more than fifty
churches suffered.

RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

On the whole, Muslims disliked
the public display of other forms of worship. Umar II and Mutawakkil
tried, in vain, to suppress the commonest manifestations of Christianity.
"The ringing of bells, the sounding of the ram's horn, and the public
exhibition of crosses, icons, banners, and other religious objects were
all prohibited."

FORCED CONVERSIONS AND
PERSECUTIONS

We have already mentioned the
forced conversions of Jews. Islamic history is also full of references to
the forced conversion of Christians, Zoroastrians and pagans. For
instance, under al Mamun in the 9th century the pagans of Harran had to
choose between Islam and death. Tavernier,
the 17th century French traveler describes how in Anatolia," il y a
quantit‚ de Grecs qu'on force tous les jours de se faire Turcs."

Armenian Christians seemed to
have suffered particularly severely from Muslim persecution. In 704_705,
the caliph Walid I gathered together the nobles of Armenia in the church
of St. Gregory in Naxcawan and the church of Xram on the Araxis, and
burned them to death. The rest were crucified and decapitated, while their
women and children were taken as slaves. The Armenians suffered even more
between 852 and 855. Given
the constant humiliation and degradation, fiscal and social oppression, it
is not surprising that many dhimmis sought a way out of their impossible
situation by converting But though technically not "forced" on
pain of death or at the point of a sword, we can still consider these
conversions as having been forced on the dhimmis. Surely, there is no
moral difference between the two kinds of "forced conversions."
Each century has its own, full account of the horrors. In the 8th century
we had the massacres in the Sind. In the 9th century, there were the
massacres of Spanish Christians in and around Seville. In the 10th, the
persecutions of non-Muslims under the caliph al Hakim are well known.

In the 11th, the fate of the Jews
of Grenada and Fez have already been alluded to; we might add the
destruction of Hindus and their temples by Mahmud at the same period. In
the 12th, the Almohads of North Africa spread terror wherever they went.

In the 13th; the Christians of
Damascus were killed or sold into slavery, and their churches burnt to the
ground. The Sultan Baibars,
whom Sir Steven Runciman calls "evil", not respecting his own
guarantees of safety to the garrison of Safed if they surrendered to the
Muslims, had all the population decapitated when they did surrender. "From Toron he sent a troop to destroy the Christian
village of Qara, between Homs and Damascus, which he suspected of being in
touch with the Franks. The adult inhabitants were massacred and the
children enslaved. When the Christians from Acre sent a deputation to ask
to be allowed to bury the dead, he roughly refused, saying that if they
wished for martyrs' corpses they would find them at home. To carry out his
threat he marched down to the coast and slaughtered every Christian that
fell into his hands. "As
for Baibar's and the Muslims' capture of Antioch in 1268, Runciman's
says," Even the Moslem chroniclers were shocked by the carnage that
followed."

In the 14th and early 15th
century, we have the terror spread by the infamous Timur the Lame,
otherwise known as Tamerlane or the "bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine"
of Marlowe's play. Tamerlane
constantly refers to the Koran, and tried to turn every one of his battles
into a Holy War, even though in many instances he was fighting fellow
Muslims At least in Georgia, he was able to give his campaign the colour
of a Jihad. In 1400 Tamerlane devastated the country in and around Tifflis.
In 1403, he returned to ravage the country again, and destroying
seven hundred large villages and minor towns, massacring the inhabitants,
and razing to the ground all the Christian churches of Tifflis.
Rene Grousset summed up Tamerlane's peculiar character by saying
that whereas the Mongols of the 13th century had killed simply because for
centuries this had been the instinctive behaviour of nomad herdsmen toward
sedentary farmers, Tamerlane killed out of Koranic piety. To the ferocity
of the cruel Mongols, Tamerlane added a taste for religious murder.
Tamerlane "represents a synthesis, historically lacking up to now, of
Mongol barbarity and Muslim fanaticism, and symbolises that advanced form
of primitive slaughter which is murder committed for the sake of an
abstract ideology, as a duty and sacred mission."

Confining ourselves to
non-Muslims, we note that he destroyed the town of Tana, at the mouth of
the Don. All the Christians were enslaved; their shops and churches were
destroyed.

According to the Zafer Nameh, our
main source of information for Tamerlane's campaigns, written at the
beginning of the 15th century, Tamerlane set forth to conquer India solely
to make war on the enemies of the Muslim faith. He considered the Muslim
rulers of north India far too lenient towards pagans, that is to say, the
Hindus. The Zafer Nameh tells us that, "The Koran emphasizes that the
highest dignity to which man may attain is to wage war in person upon the
enemies of the Faith. This is why the great Tamerlane was always concerned
to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire merit as from love of
glory."

At Delhi under the pretext that
the hundred thousand Hindu prisoners presented a grave risk to his army,
Tamerlane ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands, and
had victory pillars built of the severed heads.
On his way out of India, he sacked Miraj, pulled down the monuments
and flayed the Hindu inhabitants alive, "an act by which he fulfilled
his vow to wage the Holy War. "This
strange champion of Islam, as Grousset calls him, plundered and massacred
"through blindness or close-mindedness to a certain set of cultural
values."

Tamerlane systematically
destroyed the Christians, and as a result the Nestorians and Jacobites of
Mesopotamia have never recovered. At Sivas, 4000 Christians were buried
alive; at Tus there were 10000 victims. Historians estimate the number of
dead at Saray to be 100000; at Baghdad 90000; at Isfahan 70000.

05.06

ZOROASTRIANS

According to the Tarikh-i
Bukhara, a history of Bukhara written in about 944 A.D., Islam had to be
enforced on the reluctant inhabitants of Bukhara. The Bukharans reverted to their original beliefs no less than
four times: "The residents of Bukhara became Muslims.
But they renounced [Islam] each time the Arabs turned back. Qutayba
b. Muslim made them Muslim three times, [but] they renounced [Islam ]
again and became nonbelievers. The fourth time, Qutayba waged war, seized
the city, and established Islam after considerable strife....They espoused
Islam overtly but practiced idolatry in secret."

Many Zoroastrians were induced to
convert by bribes, and later, out of economic necessity. Many of these
"economic converts" were later executed for having adopted Islam
to avoid paying the poll tax and land tax. In Khurasan and Bukhara,
Zoroastrian fire-temples were destroyed by the Muslims, and mosques
constructed on these sites. The
Tarikh-i Bukhara records that there was considerable outrage at these acts
of sacrilege, and there was a concerted resistance to the spread of Islam.
One scholar sums up the situation thus: "Indeed, coexistence
between Muslims and Zoroastrians was rarely peaceful, cooperation was
fleeting, and conflict remained the prime form of intercommunal contact
from the initial Arab conquest of Transoxiana until the late thirteenth
century A.D."A similar situation existed in Khurasan: "The
violent military conflicts between the forces of the Arab commander Abd
Allah b. Amir and the local Iranian lords, combined later with the
destruction of Zoroastrian religious institutions, produced lasting enmity
between Muslims and Zoroastrians in Khurasan. "The early conquests of
Zoroastrian Iran were punctuated with the usual massacres, as in Raiy. If
the town put up brave resistance to the Muslims, then very few men were
spared, as for example, at Sarakh, only a hundred men were granted
amnesty, the women were taken into captivity; the children taken into
captivity were brought up as Muslims.
At Sus a similar situation emerged - about a hundred men were
pardoned, the rest killed. At Manadhir, all the men were put to the sword,
and the women and children enslaved.
At the conquest of Istakhr, more than 40000 Iranians were
slaughtered. The Zoroastrians suffered sporadic persecution, as their
fire-temples and priests were destroyed, as for example, at Kariyan, Kumm
and at Idhaj. In a deliberate act of provocation the caliph al Mutawakkil
had a tree putatively planted by Zoroaster himself cut down. Sometimes the
fire temples were converted into mosques. The fiscal oppression of the
Zoroastrians led to a series of uprisings against the Muslims in the 8th
century. We might cite the revolts led by Bihafarid between 746 and 748;
the rising of Sinbadh in 755.

Forced conversions were also
frequent, and the pressures for conversion often led to conflict and riots
as in Shiraz in 979.To escape persecution and the forced conversions many
Zoroastrians emigrated to India, where, to this day, they form a much
respected minority and are known as Parsis.
Conditions for the Zoroastrians became even worse from the 17th
century onwards. In the 18th
century, their numbers, to quote the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2
ed),"declined disastrously due to the combined effects of massacre,
forced conversion and emigration."
By the 19th century they were living in total insecurity and
poverty, and suffered increasing discrimination.
Zoroastrian merchants were liable to extra taxes; houses were
frequently looted; they had to wear distinctive clothing, and were
forbidden to build new houses or repair old ones.

THE GOLDEN AGE?

All scholars agree, and even
apologists of Islam cannot deny, that the situation of the dhimmis got
progressively worse. Many
scholars believe that as the Muslim world became weaker the position of
dhimmis deteriorated correspondingly.
The same scholars would put the beginning of the decline at the
time of the Crusades. This perception has had the unfortunate consequence
of re-enforcing the myth of the Golden Age, when supposedly total harmony
reigned between the different faiths, especially in Muslim Spain. It is a
lovely image, but, as Fletcher put it, this won't do. "The witness of
those who lived through the horrors of the Berber conquest, of the
Almoravid invasion... must give it the lie. The simple and verifiable
historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil
than it was a land of tranquility. "Was
there ever tolerance? "Ask the Jews of Grenada who were massacred in
1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in
116 (like the Moriscos five centuries later)."
I have already alluded to the general causes of the rise of this
myth of Islamic tolerance. More
specifically, the notion of the Golden Age of Moorish Spain was
perpretated, in the 19th century by "newly and still imperfectly
emancipated" Western European Jews, as a means to chastise Western
failings. Inevitably, there
was a tendency to idealise Islam, to better contrast the situation of the
Jews in Europe, and "to serve at once as a reproach and an
encouragement to their somewhat dilatory Christian emancipators."

Richard Fletcher has his own
analysis. "So the
nostalgia of Maghribi writers was reinforced by the romantic vision of the
nineteenth century. This
could be flavoured with a dash of Protestant prejudice from the
Anglo-Saxon world: it can be detected in Lane- Poole's reference to the
Inquisition...In the second half of the twentieth century a new agent of
obfuscation makes its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience,
which sees the evils of colonialism -- assumed rather than demonstrated --
foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of Al Andalus and the persecution
of the Moriscos (but not, oddly, in the Moorish conquest and
colonisation). Stir the mix well together and issue it free to credulous
academics and media persons throughout the western world .
Then pour it generously over the truth...BUT MOORISH SPAIN WAS NOT
A TOLERANT AND ENLIGHTENED SOCIETY EVEN IN ITS MOST CULTIVATED
EPOCH"[My emphases]

EIGHTEENTH, NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES

In general, as a logical
consequence of centuries of contempt, humiliation and persecution, the
position of the non-Muslims in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was very
precarious indeed. As Lewis, talking of Jews, says, "From the late
eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, expulsion, outbreaks of
mob violence, and even massacres became increasingly frequent. Between
1770 and 1786 Jews were expelled from Jedda, most of them fleeing to the
Yemen. In 1790 Jews were massacred in Tetuan, in Morocco; in 1828, in
Baghdad. In 1834 a cycle of violence and pillage began in Safed. In 1839 a
massacre of Jews took place in Meshed in Iran followed by the forced
conversion of the survivors, and a massacre of Jews occurred in Barfurush
in 1867. In 1840 the Jews of Damascus were subject to the first of a long
series of blood libels in many cities. Other outbreaks followed in
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and the Arab countries of the Middle
East."

Coming to the twentieth century,
we may mention the virulent anti-Jewish literature that has been produced
in the last forty years in the Islamic world. Much of this hate-filled
literature is in the form of translations from European languages of such
works as Hitler's Mein Kampf, and "the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion." But as Wistrich says, Muslim writers, "even when they
exploit Western anti-Semitic images and concepts, usually manage to link
these imported notions in a natural, even an organic manner, with ideas
from within their own cultural tradition."

MASSACRE OF THE ARMENIANS

Armenian Christians have been
subject to persecution by the Muslims for centuries. Here I want to allude to the massacres of 1894, 1895 and
1896. Against a background of hostilities between Russia and Turkey,
Armenians looked to Russia for protection. But this did not prevent the
massacre of more than 250 000 Armenians in Sasun, Trapezunt, Edessa,
Biredjik, Kharput, Niksar and Wan. Many villages were burned down, and
hundreds of churches plundered. Further massacres followed in 1904, and in
1909 when thirty thousand Armenians lost their lives at Adana.
According to an article which appeared in "Revue
Encyclop‚dique "in 1896, the massacres of 1894-1896 were
deliberately planned and executed -- it was no less than a methodical
extermination of the Armenians.

Unable to support the idea of
another nationality on Turkish soil, the Turks began the liquidation of
Armenians, which ended in the infamous mass murders of 1915. These murders
of 1915 have been described as the first case of genocide in the 20th
century. Much polemic surrounds the events of 1915, with historians like
Bernard Lewis denying that it was" genocide" or
"planned." Indeed,
Lewis is standing trial in France for his position. While other historians
and many Armenians insist that more than a million Armenians were
systematically exterminated in cold blood -- thousands were shot, drowned
(including children), thrown over cliffs; those who survived were deported
or reduced to slavery. This is surely nothing less than genocide, a genocide which
seems to have deeply impressed Hitler, and which may well have served as a
model for the genocide of the Jews carried out by him.

This genocide was but the natural
culmination of a divinely sanctioned policy towards non-Muslims, it was
nothing less than a jihad, perpetrated by Muslims, who alone benefited
from the booty: the possessions and houses of the victims, the land, the
women and children reduced to slavery. It was not an isolated incident,
but a deliberate policy to eliminate any nationalism of the dhimmis, and
to keep the conquered territory under Islamic jurisdiction.
As Bat Ye'or says, "the inner logic of the jihad could not
tolerate religious emancipation. Permanent war, the wickedness of the dar
al Harb, and the inferiority of the conquered harbis constituted the three
interdependent and inseparable principles underlying the expansion and
political domination of the umma [the Muslim community]."

THREE CONCLUSIONS

We are now in a position to
appreciate the conclusions of the three scholars quoted below.
A.S. Tritton in his "The Caliphs and their Non- Muslim
Subjects..."concludes:

"[The Caliph] Mutasim bought
the monastery at Samarra that stood where he wanted to build his palace.
Other caliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings,
and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries. Though
dhimmis might enjoy great prosperity, yet always they lived on sufferance,
exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob.
The episode of al Hakim [an absolute religious fanatic] must be
regarded as the freak of a mad man, not typical of Islam. But in later
times the position of the dhimmis did change for the worse. They were much
more liable to suffer from the violence of the crowd, and the popular
fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness among the educated.
The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished.
The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and
only Islam counted. There
were brilliant exceptions, but the general statement is true. If a Muslim
gave any help to the religion of a dhimmi, he was to be summoned thrice to
repentance, and then, if obdurate, he was to be put to death. Indeed, the
general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for
the dhimmis."

C.E.Bosworth, writing some fifty
years later, summed up the status of the dhimmi:

"Although protected by the
contract of dhimma, the dhimmis were never anything but second-class
citizens in the Islamic social system, tolerated in large measure because
they had special skills such as those of physicians, secretaries,
financial experts, etc., or because they fulfilled functions which were
necessary but obnoxious to Muslims, such as money-changing, tanning,
wine-making, castrating slaves, etc. A Muslim might marry a dhimmi wife
but not vice versa, for this would put a believing woman into the power of
an unbeliever; for the same reason, a Muslim could own a dhimmi slave but
not a dhimmi a Muslim one. The
legal testimony of a dhimmi was not admissible in a judicial suit where a
Muslim was one of the parties, because it was felt that infidelity, the
obstinate failure to recognize the true light of Islam, was proof of
defective morality and a consequent incapability of bearing legal witness.
In the words of the Hanafi jurist Sarakhsi (d.483 / 1090),"the
word of a dishonest Muslim is more valuable than that of an honest
dhimmi." On the other hand, the deposition of a Muslim against a
dhimmi was perfectly valid in law. It was further held by almost all
schools of Islamic law (with the exception of the Hanafi one) that the
diya or blood money payable on the killing of a dhimmi was only two-thirds
or half of that of a free Muslim.

"It is surprising that, in
the face of legal and financial disabilities such as these outlined above,
and a relentless social and cultural Muslim pressure, if not sustained
persecution, that the dhimmi communities survived as well as they did in
mediaeval Islam"

The third scholar is Bat Ye'or:

"These examples are intended to
indicate the general character of a system of oppression, sanctioned by
contempt and justified by the principle of the inequality between Muslims
and dhimmis...Singled out as objects of hatred and contempt by visible
signs of discrimination, they were progressively decimated during periods
of massacres, forced conversions, and banishments. Sometimes it was the
prosperity they achieved through their labor or ability that aroused
jealousy; oppressed and stripped of all their goods, the dhimmis often
emigrated."